Migrant entrepreneurship remains a relatively marginal topic within migration studies in Greece. Yet immigrants’ involvement in self-employment and independent economic activity has grown rather fast and has been linked to the dynamics of immigrants’ settlement and the formation of ethnic communities at a local level, especially in Athens.

The deepening crisis and austerity shaking the Greek economy and society transform radically the circumstances and the context in which the phenomenon took shape in the past two decades. Still, the study of migrants’ entrepreneurship unveils three parallel “crises” that predated the current one. Firstly, Greece’s immigration crisis, a product of the way migratory trends have been managed by the State since the early 1990s. This partly relates to the crisis of small enterprises, major employers of migrant labour in the 1990s, and the challenges posed by internationalisation and large-scale competition. Both are in turn associated to the urban crisis of Athens, referring to processes of urban development in relation to shifting social and economic geographies in the city.

The seminar will discuss results of a research project kindly funded by the Hellenic Observatory. Combining qualitative and qualitative methods, the study looked at migrant businesses in three Athenian neighbourhoods, adopting thus a micro local lens and a focus on everyday practices and relationships on the ground. These allow us not only to analyse the emergence of ethnic economies, but also to reflect on the dialectics between processes of migrant settlement, institutional and policy developments and the dynamics of urban transformation under changing economic conditions.

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